In peace there's nothing so becomes a man as modest stillness and humility

 For almost 8 months I do not think about Battletech.  I don't skim the forums or reddit.  I do not hit up sarna for anything I am curious about.  For the totality of that time I attend to my house, job, children, and stay laser focused on getting my wife through chemo for her leukemia.  I wish there was more to tell, the whole thing is kind of a blur.

Here is what I remember with clarity.  For about 6-8 weeks my wife was extremely fatigued.  There were tests and more tests.  Then she started chemo.  Chemo lasted about a month, and then there were a couple of months with smaller rounds of chemo.  Then we were waiting to see if we got on a clinical trail.  Now, in the present day, we are starting to wonder if the side effects from the clinical trial maintenance medicines are too severe for her to stay on it.

But, towards the end of chemo I started passing the time while waiting for word from the nurses and doctors by flipping through Sarna again.  Within a month I was back to thinking about Battletech as much as I had been before  I come at it a bit differently now though.

In an earlier post, I enumerated some of my problems with the Inner Sphere setting and also mentioned that "casual violence squigs me out."  I want to be clear, wargames involve violence.  That's not what  makes me uncomfortable.  But people in every fandom have met other fans who were not there primarily to have fun but because they were working something out.  Its one thing when people just want two characters in their fandom to get together like with tv shippers.  Its another when you can see the casual violence of the game doing some psychological or ideological work for them in real life that it becomes upsetting.  Everyone has met this person at a hobby shop.  Don't pretend you haven't.

Players like this are an extreme minority, but does that really matter if nobody will tell them to shut-up about the real life people they want to hurt?

I came out of my hiatus from anything and everything Battletech having had to manage my wife's care and my children's emotion.  Reading about how Games Workshop had silently avoided its own right-wing fan problem until it boiled over into something odious.  And seeing the weird persecution fantasy of one of Battletech's more prolific authors[1].  I'll confess to feeling some of the same hesitancy I felt back in middle-school.

I turned 40 a few months later.  Asked what I wanted this year, I asked my wife to try a full large scale engagement.  I got the first one I saw:  Historical Turning Points:  Luzerne.

It is almost six months later now, and I still haven't gotten to the point where that is happening.  Battletech strategic play, to me, has felt like assmebling an airplane on the runway during takeoff.  You will see that in my later posts.

The Other Shoe

One could easily confuse cancer treatment and caregiving with war gaming.  They both force a scarcity mindset the people engaging with them.  In the case of wargaming that is a necessity (and a fun one).  In the case of cancer treatment and caretaking it is downright destructive.

The first thing I need to tell you is that there are clear negative health consequences to going into healthcare (a "healing" context) using a bunch of "fighting" and "war" metaphors.  It leads to fatalism, where tons for resources are expended for a relatively small "victory."  What's worse, is that if you try to avoid the paradigm everyone else will force it on you.  You will be subjected to countless comments about the "fight against cancer" and people wanting to draft themselves into "Jane's army."[2]  You have to defend yourselves against this mindset because it will, ironically, attack you from all sides.

Still, even today I think about the last 15 months or so as my own personal Case White.

Case White

Case White was a failed attempt by Comstar to retake Terra from the Word of Blake.  I was not able to locate the fiction that Case White was told in, but it seems that Comstar had poor OpSec and the plan depended on total surprise.  A small amount of Comguard forces did make it to the surface, but Word of Blake reacted by nuking the entire city they were hiding in.

It is easy to to paint Word of Blake as fanatics, but in this instance they are actually acting relatively clear-eyed.  This is because Word of Blake seems to have protected itself from being unduly influenced by the endowment effect.

The endowment effect is a basic psychological bias that causes humans to "overvalue something that we own."  Notice that this doesn't make it bad to value something at all, only that the endowment effect can lead us to OVERvalue it.  In places such as the Comstar sourcebook, Word of Blake has made comments about the centrality of Terra to their worldview.  But their willingness to nuke two of the cities on Terra could show that they could understand Terra's relavance relative to other goods Word of Blake holds.[3]

Sober and clear-eyed.  That is how we have to face life.  Neither prone to impose our own ruberiks onto our lives, able to enjoy sentimentality so long as we don't let is overwhelm us.  May we all be as calm, cool, and collected as Word of Blake about to nuke Houston.

[1] 🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄
[2] My wife isn't named Jane.  Also, watch how few of those people actually come through
[3] Nuking them is an even bigger problem when you consider that by the 3000's the human populace had centralized itself into a number megatropolises and left the rest of Terra to cede back to nature.  So the impact of losing two of those is really bad.